The new man with Padma Lakshmi, his new woman. Photograph by Arnaldo Magnani/Liaison.

n New York, Salman Rushdie may have finally found a city he likes as much as his hometown. "It's a Western rewrite of Bombay," he says. "There's a very similar bustle and noise." The 53-year-old novelist is sitting in his agent's office in Midtown, genially ticking off the many ways Manhattan, to which he moved early this year, suits him. His tone is that of an excited tourist. He praises New York's "famous electricity." He loves "being able to get lost" in Central Park and adores the fresh bread you can get at the local bakeries. The city has a wonderful "neighborhoodiness," he says, adding, "I prefer down to up." Though this isn't anything a New Yorker would ever say, you get what he means.

This is not the ending anyone expected, least of all Rushdie himself. In 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the faithful to track down and kill the writer for the alleged blasphemies of "The Satanic Verses," Rushdie thought he would soon be dead. He went into hiding, protected by the British government. In the intervening years, hit squads killed the Japanese translator of the book and wounded the Italian translator and the Norwegian publisher -- but Rushdie survived. In 1998, under pressure from Great Britain, the Iranian government said it would not carry out the fatwa. Rushdie was free to resume his life. But what sort of life was left? There was resentment in England at the millions of dollars the government had been spending to protect him. The British press dogged him, reinforcing its readership's sense that Rushdie had somehow brought his troubles on himself. Most of all, London had been the site of his captivity. He had lived in roughly 30 houses in nine years. It was time for something new.

One choice for Rushdie might have been a small town where he could have written in relative anonymity. "But what would I do in Iowa?" he asks. "I'd commit suicide." Instead, he came to Manhattan. "The thing that always attracted me to New York was the sense of being in a place where a lot of people had a lot of stories not unlike mine," Rushdie says. "Everybody comes from somewhere else. Everyone's got a Polish grandmother, some kind of metamorphosis in their family circumstances. That's a very big thing -- the experience of not living where you started. It changes you in all kinds of ways."

London, he feels, did not spur his imagination. "I think it speaks for itself that, for somebody who lived in England for as long as I did, relatively little of my work has dealt with it." New York holds more promise. "There's so much stuff just asking me to write it down here," he says. "You know, all the furniture on the street. What places are called. Everything has a different name. Toothpaste isn't called the same thing, coffee isn't called the same thing. I just walk into a supermarket here, and I'm having to look in a detailed way at stuff that everyone else would take for granted."

D.T. Max, a frequent contributor to the magazine, last wrote about Saul Bellow.

In April of last year, Rushdie had an operation for ptosis, a condition in which the eyelids sag to the point of impeding vision. The metaphor is not hard to tease out: Rushdie wanted to meet Manhattan with wide-open eyes. "Discovery is fun," he says. "I am incredibly open to everything." Others have seen the surgery, which has given him a younger look, as an act of vanity, the sign of a man in midlife crisis. Rushdie's busy New York social life has done nothing to dispel that interpretation. Though still married, he is dating a 29-year-old model. He seems to be everywhere. He is a regular at all the clubs of the moment; he was at the premiere of Madonna's latest movie. "It just seems that the demarcations are less here," he says. "In London, you tend to find the actors are here, and the artists are there and the writers are over here, and there's not that much crossover between those worlds. Whereas here, I mean, rather very rapidly in being in New York, I have gotten to know people across all of those frontiers -- performance artists, choreographers, singers. Many of the people I know here have nothing to do with the world of books, and I like that. I like not being stuck."

He says he is relieved that New York has less of the "backbiting and incestuous" literary culture of London. He had dinner in April with Thomas Pynchon and discussed baseball. He knew a bit about this, having already gone to both of the city's ballparks. With Don DeLillo he went to a Yankees game. "I must say, going to the ballgame with Don was one of the great things, because he goes with his mitt. He's up there for every fly ball." Paul Auster in turn took him to see the Mets, "because that's his orientation." He also socializes with the British Empire's community of New York transplants, among them the Australian-born novelist Peter Carey, the Caribbean-born novelist Caryl Phillips and the Indian-born Sonny Mehta, the president of Knopf, who has published all of them. Rushdie remembers something Mehta said to him after his own first year in New York. "He said, 'You know, Salman, for people like you and me, it's a very good idea at some point to leave the British Empire.' And I think he's absolutely right."

I bring up Padma Lakshmi, the Madras-born model he met last August at the inaugural party for Talk magazine. "Things are very good as far as Padma and I are concerned," he says. "We're both happy." She has "just been shooting a movie with Mariah Carey" -- he says the name softly, sounding pleased to have the connection. He says that it is because of Padma that he has been to new clubs like Sway and Lotus. ("Padma" is Sanskrit for "lotus.") "One of the things that anybody that you are involved with, a friend or a lover," he says, "one of the gifts they give you, is to take you to places you otherwise wouldn't go." Their sorties make news in the gossip columns. Rushdie has been mentioned dozens of times since arriving in New York. "If you were a photographer, what would you do?" he shrugs. "You know, if she looked like a librarian, it probably wouldn't be such a good story." He pauses. "Sorry, librarians."

He looks at his watch on the table. He had been writing all morning and is eager to go home and get back to work. He is a new man, Ferdinand washed up on the fabulous island of "The Tempest," or maybe Balzac's Lucien de Rubempre, who left the provinces to take on Paris. Except Rushdie's own novels show how hard it is to leave the past behind. When Rushdie came to New York, he left behind his wife, Elizabeth West, whom he married in 1987, and their 3-year-old son, Milan. A 21-year-old son from an earlier marriage with whom he is close, Zafar, also lives in England. He returns frequently to visit them.

The fatwa lives on, too, at least as a memory. Shortly after arriving, Rushdie found a co-op on the Upper East Side he wanted to buy. He tells what happened next as a comic story: "This apartment just sort of came up. It was the right sort of size and the right sort of money. Then, at the interview, I had this weird experience. They said, 'Take your shoes off.' And I said: 'Why? Why should I?' And they said, 'It's a white carpet!' So, now I was sitting there in these silly little flip-flops, and I thought, That's a bad start." In the end, they turned him down. "I had a bad co-op experience," he says airily, "but then who hasn't? I suppose they didn't want a writer in the building." Rushdie says that the co-op board did not bring up the fatwa, which some Iranian extremists still promise to carry out, as an issue, but much as he wishes otherwise, it remains on people's minds in New York. He is subjected to comments by matre d's and bystanders. The comments are primarily joking, but no one, it seems, wants to be entirely safe around Rushdie. If people were, his celebrity might lose its valence. Just weeks after Rushdie arrived, The New York Post ran a column with a drawing of the writer behind cross hairs.

Since the co-op rejection, Rushdie has not tried to put down roots again. Instead, he says, he has lived in a succession of borrowed apartments, one in what he calls "Chelsea Village," the other his agent's apartment, "miles up, miles up" on Park Avenue. He lives out of "unpacked suitcases." He does his writing in borrowed rooms. "It feels very Gypsy-ish," he says without complaint.

He does complain, however, that the newspapers give a misleading picture of his life. He spends most of his time, he says, going to ordinary neighborhoods, dining at small restaurants (where he reserves in his own name) and going for long walks, absorbing the city in places where "the gossip columnists and the paparazzi aren't." Before him always is the writer's imperative to be open to new experience. "Until you find stuff out, you can't know what you think about it," he says. "The more places you can put yourself in . . . the better."

I point out that some writers are dismayed at his behavior. People died because of his words. They think he owes the world gravitas. Is it proper for him to feel, as he says, "lighter of heart" these days? After the fatwa, Martin Amis commented that his friend had disappeared onto the front page. Now he has reappeared on the gossip page. The novelist Fay Weldon says, "Salman has made his home among the posers." His friend Bill Buford, an editor at The New Yorker, points out that Rushdie has never done things by half measure. The paradox of the fatwa is that he was the last writer you could hide. "Here's how Salman goes to a concert," says Buford, who has been to several with him. "He goes. He gets good seats. He gets up and boogies."

ushdie doesn't like to talk about what he should do differently. He is at his core a writer, a man who sees life through stories. If you try to dictate the story of his life, you make him angry. In a sense, that's what the ayatollah did, and that's what those who object to his current lifestyle are now doing. "My view is, To hell with that," he says. "This is my life, and I'll make my choices. I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about."

'There's so much stuff just asking me to write it down here,' Rushdie says.

He says his time in New York is all going into the grinder in preparation for literary production. "One of the things about being a writer is that there's no wastage," he says. "Everything comes out somehow." He recently signed a contract with Random House for five books. The first book, the one he is working on now, is a thriller about a man who may or may not have committed a murder. The old part, the "back story," is in Bombay. The new, "the present moment of the novel," is in New York.

This will be New York's second appearance in Rushdie's fiction. The city was also in his last book, "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," which was published last year. In reviewing it, most critics focused on the two main characters, the rock stars Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara, as avatars of Orpheus and Eurydice. The story was a retelling of that myth. Rushdie points out that the novel was also a meditation on "three great cities" -- Bombay, London and New York -- that explored "how they were like and how they were unlike." In the novel, Bombay, where Rushdie was born to wealthy Muslim parents, comes in for extensive and loving handling. It is infused with the elegant magic with which he captured the city in his great second novel, "Midnight's Children." London seems very much a place to get through, an entrept, just as it did in "The Satanic Verses." New York, however, is the subject of adoration. "Where this city leads," Rushdie writes, "this Rome, all the world's cities quickly follow." He describes the "mighty pincushion of Manhattan puncturing the haze of the high dawn air." When the novel's narrator, Umeed Merchant, arrives here, his narration tellingly switches into the present tense. Yet the novel's portrayal of the city feels hazy. His New York is the New York of cliche, the racing, roaring glamorous capital, with the biggest, the tallest and the most beautiful of everything. Little girls carry "Giuliani & Koch 9-millimeter automatics" and rock stars carouse through the night.

The objection isn't that Rushdie didn't recreate New York as it is; he is a modernist, not a realist. But this first time around, he didn't find his New York, a New York special to him. He just recapitulated the New York that has long existed in the British literary mind, the New York of English literature from Fanny Trollope to Martin Amis. As a literary construct, it did not feel new.

Rushdie wrote "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" while living in London and summering in East Hampton. He was just a visitor here. It was before all those meandering walks in the park and those nights in the nightclubs. As time goes by and Rushdie finally unpacks, he may see a different city, a sister city to Bombay with its polyglot culture and endless, fecund migrations. No one can foresee how the city will act on his imagination. Rushdie, the most imaginative and fractured of English-language novelists, says he is ready for whatever comes. "I think the moment we're living in is a sort of a hinge moment in all sorts of ways -- historically, technologically, socially. It's a moment of great transformation, and I intend to put a story in that moment." The eyes are wide. "If you want to live in a city in the world, you may as well live in this one."